A Duke to Remember (A Season for Scandal Book 2) (6 page)

“Suit yourself.” She shrugged before turning slightly to look at him again. “Thank you,” she said suddenly.

“For not taking my clothes off?”
Boots.
He’d meant to say for not taking his
boots
off. The wrong word had slipped out. He felt heat rise in his face and braced himself for a well-deserved set-down.

Elise laughed.

He turned to stare at her.

“I think, Mr. Lawson, that there were not so many women standing up on that road this afternoon who weren’t secretly delighted that you’d taken your clothes off.”

The heat that had been creeping into his face flamed. He looked away, unsure what to say.

“You are a very handsome man, Mr. Lawson,” Elise continued beside him, sounding vastly amused. “And while a proper lady would pretend otherwise, and certainly never be so uncouth as to mention it in conversation, I find ignoring the truth a rather pointless endeavor.”

Noah didn’t know what to do with this woman who had taken his blunder and turned it into an unexpected compliment. “Thank you?” he tried.

“You’re very welcome,” she said with satisfaction.

“But you are very much a lady,” he protested, shifting uncomfortably.

“Kind of you to say so to a woman wearing wet trousers.” She grinned at him, the corners of her eyes crinkling in unrestrained humor.

In a heartbeat Noah found the air squeezed from his lungs. God, she was beautiful. Even with her hair drying into a matted cloud of rich brown waves and a streak of mud at her temple, she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

“Have I embarrassed you?” she asked.

“No.”

Her eyes danced.

“Maybe a little,” he admitted.

“Again, I fear I cannot apologize for the truth.” She smiled wickedly at him, and he found himself smiling back, caught in her contagious happiness. He heard her draw a sharp breath, and she looked away.

“What I had wanted to thank you for was your help at the river.” She was looking into the distance somewhere over the rump of his mare now. “I’m glad you waded in when you did.”

Noah felt the edges of the leather ribbons cut into his palms as he tightened his hands around them. In hindsight, that he had waded in at all shocked him. He hated the river and its dark, cold water. Though he hadn’t been thinking about the water when he had seen her struggling with the boy. Old memories surfaced, bringing with them the ugliness that accompanied them every time. “Yes.” It was a poor reply but it was all he trusted himself to say.

She nodded slightly and tucked a rebellious curl behind her ear, seemingly finding nothing odd about his response.

“London from?” he blurted, meaning to redeem himself, but not finding the right words.
Are you from London?
he had wanted to ask, before the dark memories had needled their way into his consciousness and made it hard to concentrate.

“I am,” Elise replied. “And I must confess it was good to get out of the city. Some days the stench in the summer is enough to fell a horse.”

Noah stared straight ahead, unwilling to believe that she could or would simply ignore or accept his bizarre speech. Again. She must think him a half-wit.

She twisted in her seat, pulling the wet fabric from her legs with an absent look of annoyance. “Have you been there?” she asked. “To London in the summer?”

Yes.
He shuddered. He remembered very clearly what London in the summer was like. And what London in the winter was like. And the seasons in between. “No.”

“Well,” she said, flapping her arms in an apparent effort to dry herself faster, “you’re not missing much.”

Noah watched her out of the corner of his eye. The thought struck him that, in his billowing shirt, she looked like an oversize stork trying to take flight, and he suddenly found himself smiling, the ugly memories receding as quickly as they had surged.

“You’re laughing at me again,” she commented wryly.

“Yes.”

“At least you’re honest, Mr. Lawson.”

His smile slipped. He wasn’t honest about anything. He hadn’t been honest about anything in well over a decade. And he found himself wishing he could be. Just for one moment, he wanted to tell this woman something about himself that was true. “I mix up my words,” he said suddenly. There. He was honest about that.

Her flapping stopped, and she peered at him, a faint crease in her forehead. “So?”

“So?” he repeated.

She turned her palms up. “So?”

Noah wasn’t sure what to say. Absent were the pity and the suspicion and the distaste he usually encountered when others became aware of his difficulty. “Does that not bother you?”

“I can’t sing,” she mused.

“You can’t sing?” He was confused. What did that have to do with—

“Does that not bother you?”

He blinked at her. “What?”

“I can’t tolerate being restrained, but you know that already. I cannot abide rats, and when I’m angry, I tend to curse. Very offensively, I might add. In French.”

Noah was aware his jaw had slackened.

“Anything else?” Elise was wrestling with her thick hair now, trying valiantly to twist it back into a braid.

“What?” Well, if she hadn’t thought him a half-wit before, she would now.

She gave up on her hair with a sigh. “I thought we were comparing our shortcomings. Or at least our shortcomings as others may view them.”

“Um.”

“Do you want me to think of some more?” She cocked her head and started counting on her fingers. “I’m not a proper lady, but that is probably obvious since I’m wearing trousers. I don’t let anyone handle my rifle—”

“Your
rifle
?” Noah wasn’t sure where and when this conversation had gone so completely sideways. “You have a rifle?”

She gave him a strange look. “It’s strapped to my horse. It’s not exactly small. I would have thought you’d have noticed it.”

“Why do you have a rifle?”

“I would expect for the reason most people have a rifle,” she answered, not answering him at all.

Noah remembered the long bundle wrapped in oiled cloth. “I thought that was tent poles. Or something.” In truth he hadn’t thought much about the contents at all.

“Tent poles.” She chuckled. “You’re very funny, Mr. Lawson.” She shook her head and considered the next finger on the hand that she was counting on. “Now let’s see. I’ve been told I sometimes snore when I sleep—”

“Stop,” Noah managed. “This is not what I intended at all.” He’d not intended this comparison of supposed failings, this absurd discussion of things that were irrelevant. These…shortcomings she seemed to think she had were not shortcomings. They were things that made her one of the most intriguing people he had ever met.

Elise met his eyes. “I don’t really care that you can’t find the right words all the time, Mr. Lawson. But I will care if you touch my rifle without asking.”

A bubble of something unfamiliar was rising in his chest, compressing and squeezing his heart. Something that was flooding through his veins, something reckless and wild that made him want to abandon all caution. It was all he could do not to touch her. Not to bury his hands in her mud-streaked curls and kiss her senseless. He had never met anyone like her. He was terrified that he never would again. “Fair enough,” he managed.

“Glad we got that out of the way.” She leaned back, wincing as the cart hit a hole in the road. “Who is John Barr?”

Noah took a deep breath, trying to find his equilibrium again. “John? He’s a smith. And one of the best. Nothing he can’t fix. Ploughs, weapons. He’ll shoe your gelding for you too, if you need. He’s a fair hand with even the most fractious of horses.”

Elise was shaking her head. “No, I mean, who is John to you? You said his son was like family. Are you related?”

It was a completely reasonable question. He answered carefully. “He is my family. Not by blood, but family all the same.” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her smile.

“Ah.” There was understanding in that single syllable.

“Do you have family?”

Her hazel eyes were on him again. “I do. A brother by blood. And a sister. Not by blood, but family all the same.”

He found himself smiling along with her.

“Do you have brothers or sisters?” she inquired.

His smile evaporated. “No.” It was the immediate, safe response, but memories of Abigail’s gentle eyes and her fearless heart flooded his mind.

“I’m sorry,” Elise said from beside him.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I didn’t mean to bring up painful memories.”

Jesus, had he been that transparent? “I had a sister once,” he found himself admitting. And then he couldn’t bring himself to say anything else.

“What was her name?” she asked.

“Abby,” he said, realizing that he hadn’t spoken his sister’s name out loud in over a decade. “Her name was Abby.” He felt Elise’s hand on his arm, a light, fleeting touch. She looked as though she wanted to ask him another question, but then reconsidered.

Bloody hell, it was just as well that they were almost home. Another mile in this cart and he’d be confessing every deep, dark secret about his past to a woman he barely knew. It was terrifying, how easily small truths slipped out of him in her presence.

“We’re almost there.” He turned his mare down the familiar lane that wound through a copse of trees.

Elise wriggled again, presumably against the discomfort of her wet clothes. “Thank goodness.”

A sentiment he shared wholeheartedly.

E
lise had found Noah Ellery.

The dawning of that fact had left her reeling. It defied the odds. Approached the realm of the bloody miraculous. Elise still struggled to believe that the gods of fate could have chosen to amuse themselves in such a fashion.

She hadn’t prepared any sort of a plan, which in hindsight was appalling. And embarrassing. And unprofessional. But in her defense, what Elise had prepared herself for when she rode into Nottingham was an arduous search for John Barr in the hopes that he might offer a clue to the whereabouts of Noah Ellery. Well, John Barr had certainly done that.

He had hugged her, introduced himself, and then insisted she have dinner with the next Duke of Ashland.

On the ride back, Elise had interrogated the man who called himself Noah Lawson. Subtly, using every ounce of cunning and care that she had ever learned; and the coincidences had started stacking themselves up like so many pieces of driftwood until they formed a wall that was impossible to ignore. And Elise had long ago learned that there were no such things as coincidences in the business of Chegarre & Associates.

Noah had lied when he said he’d never been to London in the summer. That had been easy to read. He had a sister named Abby. That revelation had been luckier. Elise had wanted to press further, but the shuttered look on his face had made it clear he would not say more on the subject. At least at that time.

I mix up my words.

That remark had wiped away her lingering disbelief. His confession had both touched her and relieved her beyond measure. Aye, he did that when he was flustered, that much had become obvious, though he seemed to think it an insurmountable flaw. Elise had dealt with many men and their
flaws
in the time she’d been with Chegarre & Associates, and compared to the dangerous and destructive vices and predilections of those individuals, the occasional twisted phrase didn’t even signify.

And it wouldn’t prevent him from speaking up for himself and telling Francis Ellery to go to the devil, she thought with fierce satisfaction.

Elise had made the unforgivable error of assuming that Noah Ellery couldn’t speak. Which made her squirm. Assumptions were dangerous things. In hindsight, Noah’s sister had never said that he couldn’t speak. She had only said that he
hadn’t
. Elise could only guess that Noah’s tendency to use the wrong word on occasion had kept him from speaking as a child, though that was hardly a question she could simply pose while bouncing along a country road.

In fact she was at an utter loss as to how to best broach the subject of the true nature of her presence in Nottingham. A man who had fled his past, allowed everyone to believe him dead, and built a new life complete with a fictitious name would not be in a hurry to go anywhere with her. Elise simply couldn’t blunder in and blurt out the truth. She’d need to approach this situation carefully, and in a nonconfrontational manner, to secure Noah Ellery’s cooperation. Her job would be so much easier if he wasn’t fighting her and she didn’t have to worry that he might simply disappear again. But for all of that rationale, Elise felt a little as if she had stepped onto a stage with no script memorized and no idea what part she would need to play to see this act to an end.

“My house is just over the ridge,” Noah said beside her, interrupting her thoughts.

He’d barely finished the sentence when they crested that same ridge and Elise looked down into a gently sloping vista. The late-afternoon sun had touched everything with gold, creating a backdrop that seemed magical. Thick clumps of oak, birch, and hawthorn surrounded the yard, casting deep shadows that fell on the roof of a large barn, and obscuring what Elise guessed must be the house. A handful of cows grazed placidly in a fenced pasture carved into a blanket of trees, and a small herd of hogs milled about under a partially covered enclosure. Sunlight sparkled off the river, just visible beyond cropland and the trees that edged the shore.

The air was still thick with the heat of the day, and the breeze had submitted to stillness. Birdsong resonated around her, and occasionally she caught a glance of plumage winging through the leafy boughs.

“This is all yours?” she asked as they started down the gentle incline.

“Yes.”

She closed her eyes and breathed deeply. It had been a long time since she had felt…as if she were home. A fragile blanket of peace descended. These were the sounds and the smells that put her in mind of her childhood. Of a time when things had been simple. Until they hadn’t.

Until the war had cost them their home. Until they had fled across an ocean to escape an uncertain future.

Elise opened her eyes to realize too late that Noah was watching her. She bit her lip, wondering what he had seen on her face in that unguarded moment. But he said nothing, only guided his mare around the last bend of the lane and brought it to a stop in front of the barn.

Noah hopped from his perch, and Elise did likewise, going directly to her gelding and untying him.

“Your home is beautiful,” she said, waiting, her horse’s lead rope grasped tightly in her hand.

“You haven’t seen the house.” Noah had unhitched his mare from the cart and was leading it toward Elise.

“Doesn’t matter,” she murmured. And it didn’t. The natural beauty and peace that surrounded her here were worth a hundred gilded palaces.

“Well, I built it, so have a care with my pride when you do see it.” He was grinning at her as he gestured for her to follow him into the cool, dim interior of the barn.

Every fiber in her body ignited. Bloody hell, but she couldn’t think when he smiled at her like that. The urge to taste those gentle, curving lips overwhelmed her again. She let Noah walk on ahead of her, her eyes lingering on the way his ill-fitting shirt pulled across the width of his shoulders, the way his breeches clung to his hips and powerful legs.

“You can put your gelding in the first stall on the left if it suits,” he said over his shoulder.

Elise jerked, startling her horse for the second time in as many hours. “Thank you.” She berated herself under her breath. Whatever happened, she could not allow herself to be smitten by a man whom a client was paying her to retrieve. Well, she amended, if she was being honest, she was probably already smitten. But she could be smitten from a distance. What she couldn’t do was become involved with Noah Ellery. Intimately, emotionally, physically. Not only was it unprofessional, the distraction could be dangerous.

She sighed. This all would have been a great deal easier if the heir to Ashland had been an arrogant pig.

“You can put your tack in here,” he added, his voice muffled and floating from an unseen alcove. “There’s space for a few saddles and hooks for bridles beside the harnesses.”

Elise realized that Noah had already unharnessed his mare while she was still standing motionless, lost in her musings. Quickly she led her gelding into the barn, and was greeted with a neatly swept dirt floor and the clean scent of good hay. She untacked her horse, setting her pack and rifle to the side, and secured the horse in the stall Noah had indicated. By the time she’d put away her saddle and bridle, Noah had already tossed hay into the stall and hung a bucket of water on the inside.

“Ready?” he asked.

No, she wasn’t ready. She wasn’t ready at all. She hadn’t yet prepared a single argument, nor organized a well-rehearsed explanation that would build her case to convince a dead man to return to London.

Noah bent, swinging her pack effortlessly over his shoulder.

“I can carry that,” Elise protested.

“I know you can.” He made no move to give it to her.

He had to stop doing things like this. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. Now come. I’m starving.” He headed out of the barn.

Not knowing what else to do, Elise grabbed her rifle, still wrapped carefully in its cloth, and followed him as he headed up the lane toward the trees.

The house was beautiful.

Elise didn’t have to pretend admiration as they drew nearer. She supposed it would be called a cottage, but it wasn’t like the many small, poorly erected abodes she’d passed on her way through the countryside. This was a solid building, and the attention to detail and careful craftsmanship in its construction were obvious. The walls were built of stone, almost a honey color in the late light. It was a single story, sprawling away from the lane, the small panes in the many windows glittering in welcome. The roof wasn’t thatch, as she’d been expecting, but covered in slate, much like a London home. But for all its beauty, it faded into the background, for surrounding the cottage, as far as Elise could see, were gardens.

Roses in shades of brilliant pink exploded from a sea of green, competing with the vibrant crimsons and purples of hollyhocks and cornflowers. It lacked the precise severity that so many of the London gardens boasted and instead had been allowed to flourish, empty spaces filled with color. It was a little as Elise imagined a fairy garden would look if such a thing existed.

“Damask roses,” Elise whispered.

“You know your roses,” Noah said beside her, sounding pleased.

No, I don’t. I don’t know anything about roses, except that a seven-year-old boy once planted them as a gift for his mother.

Elise stopped next to a profusion of blooms and reached out to touch a pink rose, the petals impossibly soft beneath her touch. “Is the garden yours?” she asked, though she already knew the answer.

“Yes.” He had come to stand beside her.

The intoxicating scent of roses swirled around her, accompanied by a subtle concert provided by a host of bees and birds. “It’s…” She paused, thinking
beautiful
seemed inadequate. “Exquisite.”

He was silent, though Elise could feel his eyes on her.

“I think perhaps I should like to sleep out here tonight,” she said softly. “Amid all this perfection.”

He chuckled, a deep, rich sound. “Mrs. Pritchard would have a fit if I let you sleep out here,” he told her. He paused, his laughter fading. “But thank you. Perhaps after dinner I could show you the rest.”

Elise took a deep breath. She should not be complimenting him. She could not be standing in his rose garden, discussing things that would never come to pass. She would not be touring his gardens after dinner. She should be having a very frank conversation with him that she very much doubted he would want to participate in. This was pointless, this subtle but deliberate probing. She could beat around the bush forever, poking and jabbing randomly at the periphery, hoping that something useful would emerge. And in the meantime the Duchess of Ashland would be dead, and Francis Ellery would have inherited a fortune.

The better course of action was to simply tell him the truth. Did she really think that if she confronted Noah he would run? And if he did, then he was not the man she needed him to be anyway. Not the man his sister needed him to be. And there was nothing that Elise could do to fix that, no matter how much she might wish otherwise.

If the worst happened, Elise would be better off cutting her losses and returning to London to start exploring other options.

And really, the rose garden was as good a place as any. “Mr. Lawson,” she started, unsure how to phrase what she had to say, but knowing she needed to say it.

Noah reached past her and selected one of the blooms, neatly snapping the stem. He held it out to her with a soft smile. “For you, my lady.”

Elise thought she might never remember how to draw a full breath again. “For what?”

“For being you.”

No man had ever given her a rose for simply being herself. And certainly not while standing in a magical garden bathed in golden sunlight. All thoughts of London slipped away, and she was overcome by such longing that it robbed her of whatever wits she had left.

Very slowly she reached out to accept the rose, her fingers brushing his. Neither made a move to pull away. She ventured a glance up at his face, and the possessive look she saw reflected in his eyes made everything around her fade to nothing. In that moment she couldn’t remember where she was, or what she was doing there. Couldn’t remember why it was impossible for her to reach out and touch him, or simply step forward and kiss him.

“Heavens, Mr. Lawson, but I was starting to think you’d been kidnapped by faerie folk— Oh my.” The sound of a door banging and the abrupt end of a sentence had Elise whirling in alarm.

A woman was standing frozen just at the front of the house, a cloth dangling from her fingers unheeded. Her brown eyes were opened in shocked surprise, wisps of silver hair falling around her flushed face.

Noah retreated hastily, his hand dropping from Elise’s. “My apologies for the lateness of the hour, Mrs. Pritchard,” he said, adjusting the pack on his shoulder and heading toward his housekeeper.

Mrs. Pritchard’s gaze flew to Noah, then to Elise, and back.

“May I introduce Miss DeVries,” Noah said as he gave the older woman a quick kiss on the cheek. “Miss DeVries, this is Mrs. Pritchard.”

The expression on Mrs. Pritchard’s face was one of stunned astonishment.

“A pleasure to meet you.” Elise spoke up, trying her best to inject warmth and normalcy into her words. As if she hadn’t just been caught in a rose garden, dressed in wet trousers, a breath away from kissing a man she should never kiss.

Mrs. Pritchard blinked at her, as if believing her to be real for the first time. “And you,” she replied faintly. “Welcome.”

“Miss DeVries will be staying with us tonight,” Noah continued conversationally, as if this sort of thing happened regularly.

Which, Elise suspected, based on the comically bewildered look on Mrs. Pritchard’s face, was far from the case.

“What happened to your shirt?” She was staring at Noah’s bedraggled, ill-fitting garment.

“I loaned mine to Miss DeVries,” Noah told her.

Mrs. Pritchard’s eyes snapped back to Elise. “You what?” She wheezed slightly.

“Hers was wet.”

The cloth dropped from Mrs. Pritchard’s hands to flutter unnoticed to the ground.